Facing Each Other (2 Volumes): The World's Perception of Europe and Europe's Perception of the World (An Expanding World: The European Impact on World

Description

The perception of Europeans of the world and of the peoples beyond Europe has become in recent years the subject of intense scholarly interest and heated debate both in and outside the academy. So, too, has the concern with how it was that those peoples who were variously 'discovered', and then, as often as not, colonised, understood the strangers in their midst. This volume attempts to cover both these topics, as well as to provide a number of crucial articles on the difficulties faced by modern historians in understanding the complex, relationship between 'them' and 'us'. Inevitably such relationships not only changed over time, they also varied greatly from culture to culture. The articles, therefore cover most of the areas with which the European world came into contact from the earliest Portuguese incursions into Africa in the mid fifteenth century until the explorations of Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific in the late eighteenth. It ranges, too, from Brazil to Russia, from Tahiti to China.

Contents

Contents: Introduction; Part I: General and theoretical: The medieval West and the Indian Ocean: an oneiric horizon, Jacques Le Goff; The image of the Barbarian in medieval Europe, W. R. Jones; Aboriginal property and Western theory: recovering a middle ground, James Tully; New worlds and Renaissance ethnology, Joan-Pau Rubies; The methodising of travel in the 16th century: a tale of three cities, Justin Stagl; The discovery of America and the discovery of man, J. H. Elliott; Strange things, gross terms, curious customs: the rehearsal of cultures in the late Renaissance, Steven Mullaney; Image de l'autre et image de soi-mAme dans le discours ethnologique au XVIIIe siecle, Roger Mercier; La connaissance des autres: theories et pratiques, Tzvetan Todorov; Asia: Asia in the eyes of Europe: the 17th century, Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley; Christian and Chinese visions of the world in the 17th century, Jacques Gernet; Creating an image of Europe for China: Aleni's Hsi-fang ta-wen, John L. Mish; Part II: Imagined peripheries: the world and its peoples in Japanese cartographic imagination, Masayuki Sato; China, the Confucian ideal and the European Age of Enlightenment, Walter W. Davis; Diderot and the image of China in 18th-century France, Huguette Cohen; America: Amerindian views of French culture in the 17th century, Cornelius J. Jaenen; Facing up to Caribbean history, Jalil Sued-Badillo; English perceptions of treachery, 1583-1640: the case of the American 'savages', Karen Ordahl Kupperman; Africa: White kings on black kings: Rui da Pina and the problem of black African sovereignty, Peter Russell; Scratches on the face of the country; or, what Mr. Barrow saw in the land of the bushmen, Mary Louise Pratt; African history, anthropology, and the rationality of the natives, Wyatt MacGaffey; Pacific: The exotic as erotic: Captain Cook at Tahiti, Roy Porter; The Pacific Ocean: the 18th century's 'New World', Alan Frost; Possessing Tahiti, Greg Denin